Concern of super school bid
MY husband secured a position working in the area for a large bank. Having commuted by rail from Warrington for five months, we decided it would be of benefit to our family to move closer to his work. It took many months to decide on an area: primarily good transport links into Sheffield, excellent pre school and education for our young son and of course a green, healthy environment.
As an ex-teacher I looked long and hard at the educational values in a number of locations and finally we settled on Dronfield.
What a wonderful location to bring up a young family, it holds everything we deem as being important, wonderful recreational sites for children, great greenbelt land, fantastic community spirit, good public transport links into the city, and a vast number of schools, maximum choice of excellent value adding schools to enable our son to reach his full potential.
We moved into our present house in April and, where possible due to long waiting lists, my son and I have attended mums and tots groups. I have been astounded at the number of children attending these, to the point that I actually considered setting up a group myself. Fortunately we have been able to attend The Avenue nursery located within one of our wonderful local schools, Holmesdale Infant School.
Imagine my concern at hearing about the proposals for a ‘super school’ in the area. This would mean closing two nursery classes, two infant schools and two junior schools to combine this into a massive educational and health location for the area.
I understand that provision is proposed for only 28 nursery places. Surely the council can see there are more children on their way into education: where are they going to go to nursery if the places have been halved?
I understand that one of the school sites is to be used for additional playing fields for the secondary school.
I can see the need for this as the current (quite recently built) Henry Fanshaw site does not have a great deal of green land surrounding it, but why should the new generation of children be the ones to suffer from this and have their friendly, smaller schools wit individual teaching ethos taken from them?
More houses mean more residents and more children...for the fewer nursery places. This equation does not add up.
Suzanne Brindle, Farm Close, Coal Aston, Dronfield
School row fiasco
The Myers Grove/Wisewood School merger fiasco would have been avoided if Bradfield school had been included in the planning stage .
Wisewood School should be closed and improvements made at Bradfield. All the kids would be within reach of a great school.
Myers Grove is in desperate need of a rebuilding programme and the potential is tremendous for both. The cost will be millions but so what.
It seems that in Sheffield the rich kids do OK (eg Birkdale, Girls High) and the poor kids are well catered for (Fir Vale) but the kids in the middle get a pretty raw deal.
Politics got in the way of clear thinking (two heads are better than 43 councillors!). Let’s hope that a solution is still within reach.
DS, Hollow Meadows
Political pawns!
I and many others feel that our children are being used as political pawns with no consideration of what is best for their education. A brand new, state of the art, ecologically friendly school offering the most diverse curriculum possible looks like being denied to pupils in the north-west of Sheffield.
A great many people in this area were in favour of the plans but, as our agreement was not deemed newsworthy, this view was hardly reported. Instead it was buried under an avalanche of scaremongering over traffic, scaremongering that religion or big business would be educating our children and outrught lies about Myers Grove School and its surrounding area.
Thanks to the decision to scrap the plans any money to improve and sustain two schools will now have to come from an already stretched budget. I hope the pupils and parents of other schools in Sheffield remember this when they are denied needed funding.
Tristan Yeardley, Marchwood Road, Lower Stannington
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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